It makes sense from a business perspective… Earning the same amount of revenue from a smaller number of clients reduces their overheads like support costs, marketing costs, etc. and thus increases their profit margin.

It just sucks for companies that have to spend a lot of time and effort migrating away.

Makes sense… Broadcom really are speedrunning the destruction of the VMware brand, and Proxmox VE and xcp-ng are reaping the benefits.

Some major changes Broadcom has made to VMware licensing are that they’ve killed off perpetual licenses, and subscriptions are now billed per CPU core rather than per socket. They enforce a 16-core minimum, and were trying to increase that to a 72-core minimum (but rolled that back). Competitors with enterprise support plans, like Proxmox VE, still bill per socket.

That and all the features in Proxmox VE are free (both in cost and in free software). A company has to pay a license for all their VMware servers, whereas with Proxmox they can decide to only pay for enterprise support for production servers, while using the free version for dev/test/staging environments that don’t need stability or SLAs.

The most comparable plan from another provider is the Torbox pro plan, which is around the same price IIRC. I don’t think any of the other services include Usenet, 1TB permanent storage space, a VPN, and a bunch of other features.

Last year the Premiumize Black Friday sale was 129 Euro for 3 years.

Try Premiumize. It’s probably the best debrid service available today. They usually have a Black Friday sale, so you might want to pay for a month to try it out, then get a year or two for cheap during Black Friday.

If you have an Android streaming box, try it with either Weyd or Syncler. Syncler is a continuation of the old TVZion app, if you ever used that.

In addition to file hosts and torrents like Real Debrid, Premiumize also supports Usenet. You’d still need an indexer like NZBGeek, but you can use your Premiumize account to download .nzb files instead of having to get a separate Usenet subscription. You can use the Premiumize Usenet server in Sabnzbd too, if you ever want to automate downloads using the -arr suite instead of just streaming.

legacy tlds (com, net, org) tend to be more affordable

Verisign are trying their best to make .com and .net less affordable. Their contract with ICANN is on a six year cycle, and it lets them increase the price by up to 7% for the last four years. Two years with no increases, then four years with increases. So far, they’ve always increased it the maximum amount.

Wholesale price has gone up from $6 in 2000 to $7.85 in 2020 (before this contract structure), to $10.26 now, and they’re increasing it to $10.97 on November 1.

Having said that, it’s still better than ccTLDs and newTLDs, where the registry can increase it as much as they want.

Makes sense! I didn’t realise it has a UI.

I’ve got a bunch of snippets in /etc/nginx/snippets/, so for example I just need to add include snippets/proxy.conf to a server block to add most of the configuration needed for a reverse proxy. I’ve been using Nginx for long enough that I just write the rest of the server block by hand.

I’m just using regular Nginx, which I’ve been using for 20 years. What does Nginx Proxy Manager or npmplus do better?

I’ve been meaning to try Angie too, which is a fork of Nginx.

Caddy is a good piece of software.

I’ve been using Nginx for 20 years and don’t really have a reason to switch, so I’m still using it. I use certbot, so it’s just one command to create the certificate initially, and then it auto-renews automatically via a systemd timer.

A private key leaking is bad, since anyone with the private key can decrypt data that was encrypted with it.

Traditionally, the way that leaked certs were handled was via Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL). CRLs contain lists of revoked certificates - their serial number, revocation date, and the reason why they were revoked.

However, CRLs are imperfect. Checking for revoked certificates every time you go to a site would slow things down a lot, as the lists are now too large to check and download real-time. Modern browsers and other TLS clients periodically download the lists in the background. Also, it might take a while between when the certificate is compromised and when the company notices the compromise.

Because of this, the CA/Browser forum (a group with all the major browser and TLS certificate vendors) have started dropping the max lifetime of certificates. The idea is that even if a private key does leak, the time frame that it’s usable for will be significantly shorter and any leaks should (in theory) cause less damage.

• The original maximum duration was 39 months: Three years plus an extra three months leeway for obtaining and deploying new certificates.
• March 2018: Reduced to 825 days
• September 2020: Reduced to 398 days
• March 2026: Reduced to 200 days
• March 2027: Planned to reduce to 100 days
• March 2028: Planned to reduce to 47 days

All modern deployments, regardless of if they’re using free or paid certs, should have their renewals fully-automated, so in theory the validity period shouldn’t matter as much as it did in the past. All major vendors (Let’s Encrypt, DigiCert, Sectigo, GlobalSign, AWS, SSL .com, etc) support ACME now. Reducing the validity is also a forcing function t o ensure automation is actually implemented.

somehow else in the middle and just can “ignore” certs renewals?

I’m not sure that’s possible, since an attacker in the middle shouldn’t be able to obtain a valid certificate for the domain. Certificates have a “not valid after” date encoded into them, after which the certificate is considered invalid and you get an error.

Please pay attention to: Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them.

hmmm… it sounds like p2p.

This is describing federation and decentralization, not P2P. The servers communicate with each other. P2P is when users communicate directly.

Would you consider Lemmy or email as P2P? They’re also federated and decentralized.

It’s not p2p for the enduser, but that’s why i said it was server p2p.

Your definition of “server P2P” doesn’t really make sense. Any CDN would fit this definition for example, because CDN edge servers fill data from origin servers when it’s not cached locally, and a lot of that data would be user-uploaded, but I’m not sure anyone would describe Akamai, Fastly, or Cloudflare as P2P.

Usenet has companies running the servers, and you download from and upload to the company’s servers. Nobody would reasonably describe that as P2P, regardless of how the servers are implemented.

That’s not what P2P means though. With Usenet, the articles are stored on a server, and you download them from the server. P2P always means one peer directly connects to another. The reason P2P systems exist is that they avoid things like takedowns (since you’d need to take down every user instead of a central server), and Usenet doesn’t have that advantage.

If Usenet is P2P, then every other system that lets people upload files is P2P, including things like Rapidshare, Google Drive, forums, etc. That wouldn’t make sense.

In older versions of Soulseek, you had to have two consecutive port numbers (eg. 20000 and 20001, or 12345 and 12346, etc). AirVPN was the only VPN that let you pick the port numbers, so you could guarantee getting two consecutive ports.

I don’t think modern Soulseek clients require that any more (slskd only requires one port as far as I can tell) so it’s not important any more, but AirVPN is still the most recommended by Soulseek users.

Private Internet Access only give you a single forwarded port, so you couldn’t use it for both torrents and Soulseek at the same time (for example). AirVPN used to provide 20, but I think they reduced it to 5 for new accounts.

AirVPN’s forwarded ports are also not server-specific; you get your chosen ports regardless of which server you use.

Usenet is client-server, not P2P.

The issue with “good performance” on P2P systems is that you’re reliant on other users’ bandwidth, and there’s a lot of people in the world that have slow upload speeds. Some users use a seedbox with a fast datacenter-grade 10Gbps or 40Gbps connection, but it’s not common.

The obvious approach if you want to download something from people with slow connections is to download parts of the same files from a lot of them in parallel, which is exactly what BitTorrent does. That’s good enough for plenty of use cases, which is why BitTorrent has been around for so long. The protocol is designed pretty well for this use case.

It’s got plenty of legit use cases too, especially in research (where it’s common to have data files that are tens or hundreds of gigabytes and need to be shared with other researchers) and in gaming (where it was common to use BitTorrent to download updates, at least outside of Steam).

It’s like Napster or Limewire if you ever used them. You download files directly from individual users. You can also browse all of a user’s shared files.

It requires inbound connectivity to work well, so you’ll have to ensure your VPN supports port forwarding. The VPN that’s usually recommended for Soulseek (and torrenting) is AirVPN.

They do still block US users from their main business, so they’re at least still compliant in that way. If you go to polymarket.com from a US IP, it says “Trading is blocked in the United States on polymarket.com. Switch to polymarket.us to trade prediction markets.”

I thought Polymarket was still illegal in the USA, but it turns out they launched a new, US-specific version by acquiring an existing CTFC-licensed firm and focusing mostly on sports betting. Their main business is still illegal in the US.

Makes sense. Tidal’s UI/UX definitely isn’t as nice.

I’m using my Plex server with Plexamp and CDs I’ve ripped. I don’t listen to a lot of newer music, so discovery isn’t as important. I use the free version of Google Play Music for discovery sometimes, but there’s a huge amount of AI slop.

Blame UMG - Spotify have to comply with their demands or they’ll lose their license.

Although… I don’t see this as any different from movies coming to the cinema then to paid streaming before coming to free streaming services. Free users contribute significantly less revenue, which isn’t great during the initial rush when a new album or movie is released.

Even if you do want to use a streaming service rather than buying music directly, Tidal pays something like 3x as much as Spotify per stream. They were also the first major streaming service to support lossless audio (11 years ago!) and the first to take a stance against AI-generated music. They label AI music, block royalties (people that upload AI music don’t get paid for it), and let users filter out all AI music.

I’ve already got solar panels on my roof. Originally they fully covered our usage, but my wife and I have two EVs now (a BMW iX and an i4) and charge them at home, so we’re back to having to pay the electricity company.

I’ve got 1:1 net metering (grandfathered into an old plan) so don’t need batteries.